KUMMUNIQUE

Shalom! We are proud to present another issue of Kummunique.
This issue is filled with Aliyah and Eretz Yisrael inspiration - so enjoy!

In this issue you will find:

1. "Dear Gilead" by Malkah Fleisher
2. "Never Again?" By Charles Krauthammer
3. "Olmert To Diaspora Jews: Come Home" by Attila Somfalvi
4. "Daniel Wultz Remembered In J'lem" By Joshua Brannon
5. "Israelis And American Jews: Still Talking Past Each Other" by Abraham Foxman

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1. "Dear Gilead" by Malkah Fleisher

Shalom! I received your e-mail from Yishai, and thought I would reply. You wrote:

"Dear Yishai, I'm really hurting. I have filled my Aliyah papers for my family and I, yet the more I read the news the more sick I become. I DO NOT WANT THE TAXES I PAY TO FEED MY ENEMIES!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please give me some words of chizuk!"

Look - none of us want our taxes to feed our enemies. But ultimately, that's not what life in Israel is about!

There are many ways to think about your aliyah:

1. You can think about how your aliyah serves YOU - your children's significantly advanced Jewish/Torah education, raising them with a sense of community and belonging, never being without a minyan, signing your checks with the date on the Hebrew calendar, eating special milk and honey flavored yogurt around Rosh Hashanah time.

2. You can think about how your aliyah serves ISRAEL - increasing the Jewish presence, adding to feelings of Jewish pride/growth/strength, growing children who will grow their children, and their children, and their children... adding to the brain trust and the spiritual power of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.

3. You can think about how your aliyah serves THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE - Showing Him that you choose His land, that you buy into His Torah, that you love His people, and that you would rather spend your life fighting and struggling to bring His light into this world than sitting comfortably in America, far away from the birth pains of a growing Israel.

This is not a time for despair. Frankly, we don't have that luxury, and you should not allow yourself to give into those feelings (believe me, I know how much they want to suck you down into their vortex sometimes). When faced with such an evil impulse, you should smash those feelings and renew your determination to keep your eyes on the prize, to fully invest yourself in the biblical events we are undergoing.

Never forget the incredible love that brought you to consider making Aliyah in the first place - that revelation is one of the greatest truths you have ever experienced.

Good luck, and G-d speed. We look forward to seeing you soon.

All the best, Malkah

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2. "Never Again?" By Charles Krauthammer
From Jewish World Review

The creation of the Zionist state was supposed to protect the post-Holocaust Jew forever

When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth noting. In the year 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile. For nearly two millennia, the Jews wandered the world. And now, in 2006, for the first time since then, there are once again more Jews living in Israel — the successor state to Judea — than in any other place on Earth.

Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million 10 years later and is in a precipitous decline that, because of low fertility rates and high levels of assimilation, will cut that number in half by mid-century.

When 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, only two main centers of Jewish life remained: America and Israel. That binary star system remains today, but a tipping point has just been reached. With every year, as the Jewish population continues to rise in Israel and decline in America (and in the rest of the Diaspora), Israel increasingly becomes, as it was at the time of Jesus, the center of the Jewish world.

An epic restoration, and one of the most improbable. To take just one of the remarkable achievements of the return: Hebrew is the only "dead" language in recorded history to have been brought back to daily use as the living language of a nation. But there is a price and a danger to this transformation. It radically alters the prospects for Jewish survival.

For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion — protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in Constantinople. They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades or in the Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet survive in the rest of Europe.

Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology — railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency — could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen — after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear — that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration — putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.

His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed. Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.

Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the presumed moderate of this gang, has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam." The logic is impeccable, the intention clear: A nuclear attack would effectively destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation launched by a dying Israel would have no major effect on an Islamic civilization of a billion people stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.

As it races to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran makes clear that if there is any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer. "We have announced that wherever [in Iran] America does make any mischief, the first place we target will be Israel," said Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top Revolutionary Guards commander. Hitler was only slightly more direct when he announced seven months before invading Poland that, if there was another war, "the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just turned 90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first time he feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in the face of the gathering storm — a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews — the world did nothing.

When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?

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3. "Olmert To Diaspora Jews: Come Home" by Attila Somfalvi
From YNET

PM calls on hundreds of Jewish youngsters visiting country within framework of the Jewish Agency's MASA - Israel Journey project to make aliyah: 'Go back, stay a while, then pack up and come home'

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called Monday on hundreds of Jewish youngsters visiting the country within the framework of the Jewish Agency's MASA - Israel Journey project to make aliyah.

During the project's closing ceremony, which was held at the Latrun Amphitheater, the prime minister was received with a round of applause, apart from a few chants of "traitor" and "a Jew does not expel another Jew."

Former Jewish Agency head Sallai Meridor and ministers Gideon Ezra and Zeev Boim were among those on hand for the event.

Olmert's associates mentioned that last year former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was greeted more harshly.

The prime minister was unfazed by the taunts, and resumed his speech once the hecklers were silenced. He praised Sharon for initiating the MASA project and called on the young Jewish people to come live in Israel.

"Go back, stay a while, then pack up and come home," Olmert pleaded.

"There is nothing we need more than to have you in the State of Israel."

Some 7,000 Jews aged 18-30 made aliyah within the framework of MASA. Lior Shilat, a former Sharon aide who is currently involved in running the project, told Ynet that 40 percent of all those who participate in the project eventually immigrate to Israel.

During the project's closing ceremony, which was held at the Latrun Amphitheater, the prime minister was received with a round of applause, apart from a few chants of "traitor" and "a Jew does not expel another Jew."

Former Jewish Agency head Sallai Meridor and ministers Gideon Ezra and Zeev Boim were among those on hand for the event.

Olmert's associates mentioned that last year former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was greeted more harshly.

The prime minister was unfazed by the taunts, and resumed his speech once the hecklers were silenced. He praised Sharon for initiating the MASA project and called on the young Jewish people to come live in Israel.

"Go back, stay a while, then pack up and come home," Olmert pleaded.

"There is nothing we need more than to have you in the State of Israel."

Some 7,000 Jews aged 18-30 made aliyah within the framework of MASA. Lior Shilat, a former Sharon aide who is currently involved in running the project, told Ynet that 40 percent of all those who participate in the project eventually immigrate to Israel.

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4. "Daniel Wultz Remembered In J'lem" By Joshua Brannon
From Jerusalem Post

The collective grief of some 400 mourners filled the Nitzanim Synagogue and spilled into the streets of Jerusalem's tree-lined Baka neighborhood Monday, as family, friends and strangers inspired by Daniel Wultz's courageous 27-day fight for life came to pay last respects to the American teen before his body was flown to his home in Weston, Florida, for burial.

The service was restrained, but murmuring among those assembled expressed satisfaction that IDF troops and elite border policemen had shot dead seven Palestinians Sunday - among them Elias Ashkar, the mastermind of the April 17 felafel stand bombing that claimed the lives of Wultz and 10 others.

Dubbed Israel's most-wanted terrorist, Ashkar assembled the explosives belt used in the attack and is believed to have been behind all the Islamic Jihad suicide attacks during the past year, according to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency).

"It will not bring Daniel back, but it will send a definite message to those that seek to kill Jews," said Menahem Kuttner, director of activities of Tzeirei Chabad Terror Victims Projects, who organized Monday's service. "It is not only the IDF's duty to defend, but to prevent and to retaliate after terrorist attacks."

"On one hand it's poetic justice, but it also shows the futility of it all," said a family member. "Daniel's still dead. Nothings changes."

"Our biggest revenge is showing that we are not stopping our lives," said Yuval Wultz, Daniel's cousin.

Those who eulogized Wultz chose to speak of the teenager's strength of character and his inspirational fight for life.

"Daniel was 16 years old, and I need 16 years to tell you about Daniel, because every day was different," said his father Tuly, who suffered wounds to his legs when the bomber blew up meters from where he and Daniel sat for lunch. "You left us, Daniel. You did a heroic, unbelievable fight, the fight of your life. But it was too much. I was honored to be your father, and privileged and lucky to have you for 16 years."

Others described Wultz a a deeply spiritual young man with a passion for basketball and for Israel. "Daniel was a person who radiated kindness and peace and love to anyone he was around," said Eitan Lukin, 16, who studied and played pick-up games with him at the David Posnack Hebrew Day school in Florida, before he made aliya with his family nine months ago. "He loved Israel, and he wanted to live here after he finished high school."

US Ambassador Richard Jones offered condolences to the bereaved family and placed a triangular folded flag on the casket. He also praised Wultz's strength in fighting to survive for 27 days, considering the severity of his wounds.

"Although the bloodthirsty terrorists took Daniel's life, they cannot deprive us of his spirit," he said.

Wultz died of complications associated with infections stemming from his massive injuries on Sunday to become the 11th fatality of the attack.

He will be buried on Tuesday following a memorial service at the Chabad Lubavitch synagogue in Weston.

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5. "Israelis And American Jews: Still Talking Past Each Other" by Abraham Foxman
From Haaretz

What most surprised and disturbed me about A.B. Yehoshua's remarks before the American Jewish Committee were the black and white images he projected. This is particularly unsettling considering the nuanced characters that populate his works of fiction.

Life in Israel and in the Diaspora is not so simple as to put it in terms of: one is good, the other is not, one has value, the other doesn't.

I believe that a Jew can fulfill his or her "greatest potential" as a Jew in Israel. I emphasize the words "greatest" and "potential" to make clear that despite Israel holding out the lure of the fullest Jewish life, it has tremendous challenges in order to reach that potential, while a very satisfying Jewish life is also possible in the Diaspora.

Yehoshua's description of what it means to an Israeli, alone among Jews in the world, to be in the majority, to make decisions on a governmental and societal level that affect ones life, indeed to have the totality of ones Jewishness in one's country, is compelling. His description, however, takes for granted the maintenance of one's Jewish identity simply by being an Israeli citizen.

This is an illusion. Yehoshua's shrugging off problems of assimilation among Israeli Jews is short-sighted. Particularly, if the Middle East someday becomes a more hospitable place to Israel, the question of Jewish identity will perhaps emerge in force.

It is in that sense that Yehoshua's dismissal of Jewish life in the Diaspora, as represented in his words by "texts and spirituality" is so inappropriate. It will not be enough to sustain the Jewish people by virtue of governance and judiciaries, though the existence of these institutions has fundamentally changed the Jewish condition. The unique values of Judaism and Jewish history, as well as the land of Israel, are what have sustained the Jewish people for thousands of years and will continue to do so in the future.

Far better to talk about how Israel and the American Jewish community can work together on their common challenge - maintaining Jewish identity -and what each brings to the table to meet that challenge and to help the other, rather than to revisit old rivalries about who is more important for the future of the Jewish people.

Israelis bring to the table their sense of self-confidence about who they are, that comes from living in their Jewish-dominated society. This sense of pride also benefits American Jews.

On the other hand, American Jews, engaging in much soul-searching over how to prevent assimilation in a society that has few limits, bring concepts and experience to the discussion about maintaining one's identity as a Jew without closing oneself off from the world. This subject may not appear to have relevance for many Israelis, but it does.

If Yehoshua was merely interested in stimulating a new discussion about Israel and the Diaspora, he has succeeded, and good that he has. If he truly believes all that he said, then it shows how much we are still talking past each other.

Abraham H. Foxman is National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and author of "Never Again? The Threat of the New Semitism"